On Thursday, June 21, the popular social media website Twitter.com was knocked out for 40 minutes, the longest outage the website has ever experienced. The hacker group known as UGNazi has taken credit for causing the outage, according to its twitter page. The hacker group claimed "We just #TangoDown'd twitter.com for 40 minutes worldwide! #UGnazi," in a tweet Thursday afternoon. The term TangoDown was started by the group Anonymous when referencing a successful attack on a planned target. The group acts similarly to the hacker group Anonymous in its actions, listing its targets and reasons for attacking these targets. A few examples of these are found on their website: "Google -- for the Lulz, nothing can stop us, 4chan.org -- Eliminate the Pedophiles, Naqdaq.com [sic] -- F*** the stock-market." The most common method used by hackers like UGNazi and Anonymous when attacking websites is DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service attacks, where hackers overload the target's website with fake traffic, causing the servers to crash. Twitter has not confirmed that their servers were knocked out from a hacking attack, claiming that they were knocked out from a "cascaded bug."
DDoS attacks are tough to prevent. Many experts agree that making sure your gateway servers, switches, and firewalls are updated with the most recent versions of their operating systems. This can help protect from attacks that rely on TCP/IP and TCP/IP stack implementation weaknesses. Another more drastic measure to prevent Distributed Denial of Service attacks would be to drastically expand the amount of bandwidth your servers have so they can handle as much traffic as possible.
Summary by Tim Houmes
On Thursday, June 21, the popular social media website Twitter.com was knocked out for 40 minutes, the longest outage the website has ever experienced. The hacker group known as UGNazi has taken credit for causing the outage, according to its twitter page. The hacker group claimed "We just #TangoDown'd twitter.com for 40 minutes worldwide! #UGnazi," in a tweet Thursday afternoon. The term TangoDown was started by the group Anonymous when referencing a successful attack on a planned target. The group acts similarly to the hacker group Anonymous in its actions, listing its targets and reasons for attacking these targets. A few examples of these are found on their website: "Google -- for the Lulz, nothing can stop us, 4chan.org -- Eliminate the Pedophiles, Naqdaq.com [sic] -- F*** the stock-market." The most common method used by hackers like UGNazi and Anonymous when attacking websites is DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service attacks, where hackers overload the target's website with fake traffic, causing the servers to crash. Twitter has not confirmed that their servers were knocked out from a hacking attack, claiming that they were knocked out from a "cascaded bug."
DDoS attacks are tough to prevent. Many experts agree that making sure your gateway servers, switches, and firewalls are updated with the most recent versions of their operating systems. This can help protect from attacks that rely on TCP/IP and TCP/IP stack implementation weaknesses. Another more drastic measure to prevent Distributed Denial of Service attacks would be to drastically expand the amount of bandwidth your servers have so they can handle as much traffic as possible.